August is ending, and yet today's high is going to be 28+°C, that unseasonable summer air in early fall. With my fan humming away, I wrote yesterday about how, for the first time, I've exceeded my free Netlify bandwidth of 100GB for the month, with five days still left to go. Everything is fine as of right now, but I've gone ahead anyways and wired up my homelab to be able to run this site, replacing the various functions and webhooks with MySQL databases and Caddy files in Docker. Containers stacked like a Jenga game. And I'm sure I'll write a tutorial about the process in the future, since it would probably be useful for people to know how to migrate off of Netlify while still retaining the features the hosting platform provides. There was an existential crisis during the procedure for me, though. I recall when I would simply write the words for a short blog post during my lunch break at work and post them to Medium.com—fast forward to now, and it's now ingress, provisioning, blob storage, and webhooks. Each day that I've tinkered with my website I've returned more and more to web development and programming—all with the hope that the additional functionality I've been adding has improved the experience and allowed more two-way communication. I look at the Caddyfile and docker-compose.yml I have to write, and it makes me take a step back and question what I'm doing here at all. Though, that doesn't actually have anything to do with writing or coding, but rather the rest of my life in-between. As you may be able to tell by the number of posts I publish and their typical length, I've devoted my life to this project. That sounds dramatic, but it is the truth—if I'm not at a screen researching or writing or debugging a local dev server, then I'm taking a break or sleeping. There is an ascetic quality to it. Sometimes I ask myself if I feel as though I'm missing out on anything, or if I shouldn't be putting all of my eggs in one basket, but I don't find myself wanting. I don't find myself lacking. But there are consequences to this. Consequences I'm not proud of. The close friends I had in person but no longer have, for instance. I realized that many of my relationships had become too one-sided—that others were putting in far more effort than I was—and I made the call that it was shittier to let that continue than to be honest and end things. I have always been the kind of person to act impulsively, as though social acts were irreversible, and burn bridges that could be left standing. I've also reached capacity in my bandwidth. In some ways, my bandwidth could be regarded as impressive—having the ability to write and create consistently for so long. But in many more ways, my bandwidth is shockingly low, and I've had to be strategic and tactical with how I use my time and energy because of that. And that has included making some difficult, and often hypocritical, decisions. I don't really know what's happened. I look back at the twenty-year-old Brennan who biked everywhere and went to school full-time, worked part-time, and still maintained a social life. On paper, I've lived a rich decade but in practice I'm so much less sure. There are a million more things I could be doing, a million more connections I could be weaving, and instead I'm here sitting at my desk writing yet another blog post. An unlived life stacked against these four walls. And this is what I want to be doing, or at least what I feel a magnetic compulsion toward. I've come to realize so much of my life, heavy with masking, was doing what I thought was the right thing to do, what "normal" people do. And I didn't question things until I had the time and silence to do so. And there is a shade of guilt that comes with that—questioning why I can't be more typical and have a drive to live a larger life with more dimensions. I think of Emily Dickinson, the reclusive hermit, the myth of Amherst. The New England Mystic wrote over 1,800 poems in her isolation, so rarely seen outside of her homestead that she was conjured into a ghost by her neighbours. And it is a ghost-like existence; a peculiar fraction of a death. From the other side of the screen, you might have had a totally different assumption about the kind of life I was living, given how much I pour into my work. You expected this to end with a triumphant declaration—a neat resolution where I announce I'm changing for the better. I wish I could offer myself a clean break. There's no vinyl to flip over. Instead, the fan doesn't stop humming white noise, and the August heat pushes fresh wind through the open window. Quiet room, screen glowing, words always finding their way out. Everything else beyond that is tentative, determined by a calculus I can't see. Arithmetic of unspent days. But regardless of what tomorrow brings, you know there's certainty in the fact that I'll write about it. About Brennan Kenneth Brown Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications. Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more: Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors